Soft Fascination by Adele Wilkes

Image: Adele Wilkes, Soft Fascination (detail), 2024

“Attention is the beginning of devotion" - Mary Oliver, poet

In the highly stimulating sensory landscape of contemporary life, we are often disconnected from the natural world yet hyperconnected digitally. Can nature restore tranquillity to our minds and in turn help us become more attuned to the ecosystems that sustain life on earth?

The concept of “soft fascination” comes from environmental psychology and refers to the “restorative attentional mode” – a kind of effortless or involuntary attention – experienced in nature. Drawing on ideas about environmental psychology and neuroscience, this moving image work focuses on the dynamic details of a vibrant subtropical botanic garden to invite our attention towards the relationships between multispecies and different ways of sensing the world around us.

Soft Fascination showcased audio-visual field recordings of a uniquely fascinating garden ecology to consider non-human intelligence, synaesthesia, multisensory experiences, and deep listening practices. The use of specialised recording equipment (such as microphones that can record the internal resonance of trees or water) allows us to perceive this world beyond the limitations of our ordinary abilities, expanding our senses to enhance our ecological connectedness, empathy, attention, and even devotion towards the nonhuman.

About the artist - Adele Wilkes

Adele Wilkes is an artist, filmmaker and researcher whose practice merges moving image, sound, photography, projection and installation, with a focus on experimental, affective, expanded and speculative modes of documentary and cinematic storytelling. Her work has been shown in Australia and internationally, including Melbourne Now at National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Australian Centre for the Moving Image  (ACMI), Buxton Contemporary, Channels Festival, Composite: Moving Image Agency and Media Bank, Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh), Aphids, Next Wave Festival, Sydney Contemporary, Magnum Photos, Liquid Architecture, Museum of Brisbane, Bunjil Place, Midsumma Festival, Melaka Art and Performance Festival, MONA FOMA, ABC TV, and film festivals in the UK, US and Europe. Her photographic work was shortlisted for the Bowness Photography Prize and the National Photographic Portrait Prize. She is a PhD candidate at RMIT School of Art, Naarm/Melbourne. She is a founding member of Fruiting Bodies Queer Ecology Collective.

When

Location

ArtSpace at Realm, Ringwood Town Square (opposite Ringwood Station), 179 Maroondah Highway, Ringwood, 3134, View map